This excerpt is from: "The Sociopath Next Door: The Ruthless vs. the Rest of Us" by Martha Stout Ph.D.
Imagine - if you can - not having a conscience, none at
all, no feelings of guilt or remorse no matter what you do, no limiting sense
of concern of the well-being of strangers, friends, or even family
members. Imagine no struggles with
shame, not a single one in your whole life, no matter what kind of selfish,
lazy, harmful, or immoral action you had taken.
And pretend that the concept of responsibility is unknown to you, except
as a burden others seem to accept without question, like gullible fools. Now add to this strange fantasy the ability
to conceal from other people that your psychological makeup is radically
different from theirs. Since everyone
simply assumes that conscience is universal among human beings, hiding the fact
that you are conscience-free is nearly effortless. You are not held back from any of your
desires by guilt or shame, and you are never confronted by others for your
cold-bloodedness. The ice water in your
veins is so bizarre, so completely outside of their personal experience that
they seldom even guess at your condition.
In other words, you are completely free of internal
restraints, and your unhampered liberty to do just as you please, with no pangs
of conscience, is conveniently invisible to the world. You can do anything at all, and still your strange
advantage over the majority of people, who are kept in line by their
consciences, will most likely remain undiscovered.
How will you live your life? What will you do with your huge and secret
advantage, and with the corresponding handicap of other people
(conscience)? The answer will depend
largely on just what your desires happen to be, because people are not all the
same. Even the profoundly unscrupulous
are not all the same. Some people -
whether they have a conscience or not - favor the ease of inertia, while others
are filled with dreams and wild ambitions.
Some human beings are brilliant and talented, some are dull-witted, and
most, conscience or not, are somewhere in between. There are violent people and non-violent
ones, individuals who are motivated by blood lust and those who have no such
appetites.
Maybe you are someone who craves money and power, and
though you have no vestige of conscience, you do have a magnificent IQ. You have the driving nature and the
intellectual capacity to pursue tremendous wealth and influence, and you are in
no way moved by the nagging voice of conscience that prevents other people from
doing everything and anything they have to do to succeed. You choose business, politics, the law,
banking or international development, or any of a broad array of other power
professions, and you pursue your career with a cold passion that tolerates none
of the usual moral or legal encumbrances.
When it is expedient, you doctor the accounting and shred the evidence,
you stab your employees and your clients (or your constituency) in the back,
marry for money, tell lethal premeditated lies to people who trust you, attempt
to ruin colleagues who are powerful or eloquent, and simply steamroll over
groups who are dependent and voiceless.
And all of this you do with the exquisite freedom that results from
having no conscience whatsoever.
You become unimaginably, unassailably, and maybe even
globally successful. Why not? With your big brain, and no conscience to
rein in your schemes, you can do anything at all.
Or no - let us say you are not quite such a person. You are ambitious, yes, and in the name of
success you are willing to do all manner of things that people with conscience
would never consider, but you are not an intellectually gifted individual. Your intelligence is above average perhaps,
and people think of you as smart, maybe even very smart. But you know in your heart of hearts that you
do not have the cognitive wherewithal, or the creativity, to reach the
careening heights of power you secretly dreams about, and this makes you
resentful of the world at large, and envious of the people around you.
As this sort of person, you ensconce yourself in a niche,
or maybe a series of niches, in which you can have some amount of control over
small numbers of people. These
situations satisfy a little of your desire for power, although you are chronically
aggravated at not having more. It chafes
to be so free of the ridiculous inner voices that inhibit others from achieving
great power, without having enough talent to pursue the ultimate successes
yourself. Sometimes you fall into sulky,
rageful moods caused by a frustration that no one but you understands.
But you do enjoy jobs that afford you a certain
undersupervised control over a few individuals or small groups, preferably
people and groups who are relatively helpless or in some way vulnerable. You are a teacher or a psychotherapist, a
divorce lawyer or a high school coach.
Or maybe you are a consultant of some kind, a broker or a gallery owner
or a human services director. Or maybe
you do not have a paid position and are instead the president of your
condominium association, or a volunteer hospital worker, or a parent. Whatever your job, you manipulate and bully
the people who are under your thumb, as often and as outrageously as you can
without getting fired or held accountable.
You do this for its own sake, even when it serves no purpose except to
give you a thrill. Making people jump
means you have power - or this is the way you see it - and bullying provides
you with an adrenaline rush. It is fun.
Maybe you cannot be a CEO of a multinational corporation,
but you can frighten a few people, or cause them to scurry around like
chickens, or steal from them, or - maybe, best of all - create situations that
cause them to feel bad about themselves.
And this is power, especially when the people you manipulate are
superior to you in some way. Most
invigorating of all is to bring down people who are smarter or more
accomplished than you, or perhaps classier, more attractive or popular or
morally admirable. This is not only good
fun; it is existential vengeance. And
without a conscience, it is amazingly easy to do. You quietly lie to the boss or to the boss's
boss, cry some crocodile tears, or sabotage a coworker's project, or gaslight a
patient (or child), bait people with promises, or provide a little
misinformation that will never be traced back to you.
Or now let us say you are a person who has a proclivity
for violence or for seeing violence done.
You simply murder your coworker, or have her murdered - or your boss, or
your ex-spouse, or your wealthy lover's spouse, or anyone else who bothers
you. You have to be careful, because if
you slip up, you may be caught and punished by the system. But you will never be confronted by your
conscience, because you have no conscience.
If you decide to kill, the only difficulties will be the external
ones. Nothing inside you will ever
protest.
Provided you are not forcibly stopped, you can do
anything at all. If you are born at the
right time, with some access to family fortune, and you have a special talent
for whipping up other people's hatred and sense of deprivation, you can arrange
to kill large numbers of unsuspecting people.
With enough money, you can accomplish this from far away, and you can
sit back safely and watch in satisfaction.
In fact, terrorism (done from a distance) is the ideal occupation for a
person who is possessed of blood lust and no conscience, because if you do it
just right, you may be able to make a whole nation jump. And if that is not power, what is?
Or let us imagine the opposite extreme: You have no interest in power. To the contrary, you are the sort of person
who really does not want much of anything.
Your only real ambition is not to have to exert yourself to get by. You do not want to work like everyone else
does. Without a conscience, you can nap
or pursue your hobbies or watch television or just hang out somewhere all day
long. Living a bit on the fringes, and
with some handouts from relatives and friends, you can do this
indefinitely. People may whisper to one
another that you are an underachiever, or that you are depressed, a sad case,
or, in contrast, if they get angry, they may grumble that you are lazy. When they get to know you better, and get
really angry, they may scream at you and call you a loser, a bum. But it will never occur to them that you
literally do not have a conscience, that in such a fundamental way, your very
mind is not the same as theirs.
The panicked feeling of a guilty conscience never
squeezes at your heart or wakes you in the night. Despite your lifestyle, you never feel
irresponsible, neglectful or so much as embarrassed, although for the sake of
appearances, sometimes you pretend that you do.
For example, if you are a decent observer of people and what they react
to, you may adopt a lifeless facial expression, say how ashamed of your life
you are, and talk about how rotten you feel.
This you do only because it is more convenient to have people think you
are depressed than it is to have them shouting at you all the time, or
insisting that you get a job.
You notice that people who do have a conscience feel
guilty when they harangue someone they believe to be "depressed" or
"troubled." As a matter of
fact, to you further advantage, they often feel obliged to take care of such a
person. If, despite your relative
poverty, you can manage to get yourself into a sexual relationship with
someone, this person - who does not suspect what you are really like - may feel
particularly obligated. And since all
you want is not to have to work, your financier does not have to be especially
rich, just relatively conscience-bound.
I trust that imagining yourself as any of these people
feels insane to you, because such people are insane, dangerously so. Insane but real - they even have a
label. Many mental health professionals
refer to the condition of little or no conscience as "anti-social
personality disorder," a non-correctable disfigurement of character that
is now thought to be present in about 4 percent of the population - that is to
say, one in twenty-five people. This
condition of missing conscience is called by other names, too, most often
"sociopathy," or the somewhat more familiar term psychopathy. Guiltlessness was in fact the first
personality disorder to be recognized by psychiatry, and terms that have been
used at times over the past century include manie sans délire, psychopathic
inferiority, moral insanity, and moral imbecility.
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